


fragmentary, vacuous, and other synonyms for the aftermath

by notquitepunkrock



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, I lied, Infinity War spoilers, M/M, Multi, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, POV Switches, POV Third Person Limited, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stream of Consciousness, black panther shuri shhhhhh, but its always, does this count as major character death, hopeful, i am in mourning and this is what came out of it, i mean i personally ship peterned but this could just be gen, it's a fic and a vocab lesson!, lesbians at the very very very end, listen i took lit but that doesnt mean i absorbed any of it, literally dont read if you havent watched the movie yet, lowercase ~for the aesthetic~, sort of i think?, there is comfort, two in one!!, written pre-endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-30 00:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 16,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14484195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notquitepunkrock/pseuds/notquitepunkrock
Summary: ned heard the screaming first.a study of the kids in the aftermath of infinity war.previously just titled "fragmentary"





	1. fragmentary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fragmentary (ˈfraɡmənˌterē)  
> adjective  
> consisting of small parts that are disconnected or incomplete

ned heard the screaming first.

after peter had left the bus, he’d gone radio silent. the giant ship disappeared from the sky over new york and peter didn’t come back. of course, may had been frantic, but ned didn’t have answers. his own heart had pounded in his chest every time peter’s phone went straight to voicemail.

(his phone never went straight to voicemail. karen usually answered, or the phone rang first, at the very least.)

and then came the screaming. and the sirens, and the cars crashing into each other and buildings, and no sign of any heroes anywhere. no sign of peter anywhere.

and then his sister screamed.

ned left his room just in time to watch his parents dissolve into dust, one after the other. just in time to see his little brother fade away until the only ones left in the apartment were ned and his sisters.

peter still wasn’t answering his phone.

and now, neither was half the decathlon team. neither was may when he called, desperate. anna couldn’t get ahold of her friends and ellie just kept crying and Ned felt like he couldn’t get out of the house fast enough.

when mj called, something lifted off his chest for just a moment. she never called, but there she was on the other side of the phone, and he thought she might be crying, but she was there. whatever had happened hadn’t happened to her. ned could breathe a little better now, as he ran through the streets to her apartment, because her dad had just _disappeared_ , just like ned’s parents and she was alone. together they holed up on the floor of her living room, and tried to figure out who was gone. every five minutes, ned and anna texted each other reassurances they were still alive.

neither of ned’s brothers answered. james’ roommate picked up the phone and wouldn’t stop crying long enough to talk, so ned hung up. just hearing that was enough. neither ken nor his wife answered their phones, and that was enough too.

flash was gone, and god, ned had wanted him to leave him alone and shut his stupid face, but not this way. 

liz wasn’t answering mj’s frantic calls and that stung like a knife. a piece of his heart heart shattered with every line that went dead.

they stayed like that, alone in the apartment for hours until anyone found them. a man in a suit, with a stark industries lanyard around his neck and anna and ellie at his side knocked on the door. he didn’t explain anything, just ushered them onto a jet that was parked on the roof - which was enough of a “what the fuck” alone, but ned was just so tired and scared and peter still wasn’t answering him.

even being ushered into the avengers compound and meeting pepper fucking potts didn’t resonate within him. ned just clung to his sisters and watched mj’s tired face from the corner of his eye and listened.

“i just talked to cap,” ms. potts was saying, and ned couldn’t even summon the energy to be amazed. “i can’t tell you everything yet but… but something very bad happened, and i know you’re peter’s friends and you’re alone and alive so you can stay here as long as you need.”

she said something about school and something about sleep and then ned and mj and his sisters were escorted to a series of rooms with peter’s name on the door and he didn’t even cry at the sight, though the grip on his heart squeezed tighter than ever.

in the morning he would.

in the morning, captain america and bruce banner would come explain what happened, that half the universe was dead, and there would be an ache in his chest and a hole in his heart.

in the morning, ned and mj would eat breakfast with colonel 'war machine' rhodes and thor, both of whom looked so broken that ned could barely breathe, and they’d hear stories of the losses that had broken them. (mj would disappear quietly to the room and not come out for days after that.)

in the morning, hawkeye would walk into the kitchen with a little girl in his arms and a boy clinging to his back and clutch the black widow to his chest, and ned would avert his eyes and think of his family that was gone too.

in the morning, captain america would tell ned and his sisters about bucky. they told him about may and their parents and peter and the iron grip around ned’s heart squeezed a little harder at the mention of his best friend.

in the afternoon, iron man would walk into peter's rooms and see them and just break, and that’s how they knew for sure that he was gone.

it was twenty-four hours after ned heard the first screams when he finally broke.


	2. vacuous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> vacuous (ˈvakyo͞oəs)  
> adjective  
> empty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooo plot twist this is a multichap fic now!! sort of. I still have lots of feelings okay?

michelle tried to forget her father’s face as he crumbled into nothing, but it was scarred into her brain. the quiet “oh” that made her look up from her book in disinterest before launching herself over the couch. the ash that slipped through her fingers as she sat in the middle of the kitchen, the pizza they hadn’t gotten to eat still sitting on the counter. a glass had shattered as he disappeared, dropping from his hands onto the tile, and the shards mixed with the ash to catch her fingers until her own hands were covered in what remained of her father and glass and her own blood.

peter didn’t answer the phone when she called, because he hadn’t answered her all day, and neither did his aunt may. ned did answer, and he was halfway to her apartment before the desperate pleading left her throat.

by the time they’d landed at the avengers compound that evening, her eyes were dry and her heart was empty. she’d never been much of a crier in the first place. michelle tended to get mad before she got sad, was more likely to punch something than to break down into tears - and besides, Nnd’s sisters had cried enough for the four of them and then some.

and, probably, that was messed up, that she hadn’t spent more time crying after watching her father disintegrate in front of her eyes, but by the next day her knuckles were cracked and bleeding from trying to scrub the feeling of ashes off of them, so she thought that maybe made up for it. 

she didn’t know why ned held out hope for peter for so long, though. there was a part of her that  _ had _ been hopeful, once she learned that he’d left the planet with tony stark, but she knew not to let herself trust it. Not after may and liz and fucking king t’challa. whatever this was hadn’t spared so many people who deserved to live so much more than michelle did, so it stood to reason peter would be gone too. when it was confirmed, she had swallowed and nodded, but she was too empty to react with anything other than a small, accepting nod. 

he was gone, and so was her dad, and they were in the avengers compound and she’d just met tony stark and pepper fucking potts. And maybe she was a little bit broken inside now, because she didn’t even feel a thing.

michelle hadn’t realized she’d never seen ned cry before until he ran back to peter’s rooms, and she’d followed him. and suddenly she felt terrible, not because peter was gone but because it didn’t  _ hit her _ not like it had hit ned. after all, she and ned were close, had gotten closer after she figured out peter was spider-man and had taken to joining ned while peter was on patrol, but ned had lost his best friend in the world. he’d lost the one person who’d been with him through everything, and he’d lost his parents and almost all of his siblings and may, who might as well have been another mom to him. 

michelle didn’t have a family except her dad, had never had friends before Homecoming with liz, and maybe nationals with ned. to her this was just thrusting her back into the all-consuming loneliness that had been most of her life so far.

(as she hugged ned to his chest and let him cry, michelle thought of liz and of her dad, and maybe a few tears leaked out, but she would never admit it.)

within hours after finding out about peter, ned’s sisters boarded a plane to some tiny ass town in the middle of oklahoma, where their mom lived. she had survived, and wanted her girls with them. god, in that moment michelle wished more than anything that her mom wanted anything to do with her - that she even knew where her mom was in the first place. they offered to bring ned along, despite having a different mother altogether, but he shook his head and stood his ground. They offered to bring michelle along but, well, someone had to look out for ned.

(And just maybe, she didn’t want to leave new york. didn’t want to stray too far from peter and her dad in case somehow this was all a test, a dream, a fake out.)

ned met princess shuri - or, well, queen, now, michelle supposed - before she did. He’d actually left their rooms, was the thing, went looking for something to do or people to talk to or sometimes disappeared with his laptop without a word, whereas michelle spent most of her time burying herself in books or journals. occaisionally she spent time puttering around on the new starktech laptop that she’d found sitting on peter’s desk, because, well, hey, he wasn’t using it. 

she also spent a lot of her time washing her damn hands.

(but that wasn’t the point.)

ned brought shuri back to the rooms once they met, and introduced her, and if it had been forty-eight hours before, michelle might have bombarded her with questions. if it had been forty-eight hours before, if her father and peter and liz had still been alive, michelle would have been ecstatic to meet the leader of wakanda, a sixteen year old with brains to rival tony fucking stark or bruce fucking banner and access to tech that michelle couldn’t even imagine. 

now all she could think of was how much liz would have loved to meet her, and damn it michelle was turning into a sap.

but something inside shuri seemed to click because even these subdued versions of her, of michelle, of ned, seemed to get along so seamlessly that before long she’d brought her things into peter’s rooms and the three of them were watching movies and hacking stark’s tech (well, ned and shuri were, mostly) and, just for a moment, they were able forget about how much they’d lost and just be kids.

that was, until ned found a lego millenium falcon set shoved into the closet with his name scrawled in peter's handwriting across the top and michelle moved to send a picture to her dad and shuri started a sentence with “my brother…” and they were once again reminded that half the universe had disintegrated into nothing.

they told stories of those they’d lost. shuri told them about her brother, showed them videos of him reacting to her screeches of “the floor is lava” and photos of them together. ned pretended not to get choked up as he talked about his brothers and his parents and peter, but the wistful way he talked about his best friend nearly made michelle cry too. for her part, michelle spoke softly about how stupid Flash was, but at least he knew to shut up during decathalon meets and let the better teammates answer; about how her dad made s’mores in the microwave when she was upset and once blew up the marshmallows; about how she and liz had become each other’s stand-in dates when peter and ned had disappeared during homecoming and she'd let the other girl cry on her shoulder when her dad was arrested.

curled up there, on the floor in front of the sofa, they shared their stories, and slowly put each other’s pieces back together. at night they sprawled into the big bed, despite the extra bedroom that was probably for may and the pull out couch, becoming a massive pile of limbs and drool and bad breath. 

you could tell things were getting better during the following days. eventually, at shuri and michelle’s insistence, ned sought out first Banner and then Stark, showed them his computer tech and helped them when his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he just needed to do  _ something _ . 

shuri began discussing plans with the avengers, spent time on long-winded conference calls with world leaders and with general okoye and m'baku, who she’d left in charge in wakanda. sometimes, she’d be busy until dinnertime, when michelle would slip into the room she’d taken over and drag her away for food and cocoa and movies and silly card games, until shuri didn’t look like she had aged five years in one day.

and michelle began emerging from the rooms too. she ate lunch and breakfast with some of the avengers, picking their brains on things that maybe didn’t matter anymore. (her protests, her campaigns, planned parenthood, movements that had suddenly fallen silent in the aftermath as they struggled to regroup.)

at the end of their first week in the compound, ms. potts - “call me pepper” - called michelle into her office and set her to work. she gave her small tasks, for both the running of the compound (keeping everyone safe, sane, and alive, as pepper joked with a sad smile) and stark industries, things that would keep michelle busy and from thinking about everything that she’d lost. 

and yeah, michelle still felt a little empty inside, but the holes were slowly being filled.


	3. masquerade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> masquerade (ˌmaskəˈrād)  
> noun  
> to pretend to be what one is not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my beta says this was the most painful chapter to read but she hasn't read chapter four yet so take that with a grain of salt i guess

the first thing shuri did after being made queen of wakanda was to arrange funerals for all of her people lost in the battle with thanos. the second thing she did was put a council of tribes in charge while she boarded a plane to new york with the avengers and a black panther suit stuffed into the bottom of her luggage. 

she sat at the back of the plane with a notebook, pretending that she wasn’t lonely. she pretended that she wasn’t devastated by losing her brother -  _ again,  _ a bitter voice in the back of her head whispered, the one that was still just a teenager without the front of royalty and leadership she had been putting up since the battle.

the plane was quiet, a heavy air of mourning settling over it as they flew, and when they finally landed at the compound, shuri was desperate to get away from everyone. there would be time for meetings later, for plan-making and discussions with what remained of the worlds’ leaders, but the second she got into her rooms built by stark (her brother’s rooms, really, she could have guessed even without his name on the door) she collapsed into a heap and cried. 

she cried for her country, for so many people who had faded away into nothing. she cried for t'challa, and for her mother, who had slipped right through her fingers like sand. she cried for herself, for this responsibility that now rested heavy on her shoulders.

shuri allowed herself to cry to sleep that night, and that night only. the next day she emerged from her rooms with her head held high and her mouth set in a determined line as she joined stark and banner in their lab.

(it was a testament to how upset she really was that she didn’t make any teasing comments about the state of their tech.)

it was after lunch that she ran into ned leeds, friend of spider-man. he’d been startled to see her, tripped over himself a bit, and she herself was startled by how young he was. it was startling because that’s how young  _ she _ was, and she was the queen of an entire country.

it was startling that a boy as young as her had risked his life to save his city. had, even, risked and lost his life to save the world.

(a whisper in the back of her mind reminded her of t'challa, always so willing to do anything for their people. a whisper in the back of her mind reminded her that it didn’t matter - both her brother and spider-man were gone.)

( _d_ _ ead, _ she tried to remind herself, but the word wouldn’t dare cross her mind.)

ned was kind and he was smart, and his friend mj was snarky and for just a while, shuri could let her mask drop around them. because they were grieving too, told her stories of their families and friends who had drifted away on the wind, and they didn’t need her to be a strong queen or a hero. they wanted her, but they didn’t need her at all. of that, shuri was sure. 

the thing was, she needed them.

she needed friends her own age, so she could pretend she didn’t have the world upon her shoulders. she needed someone to talk to, to laugh with, someone who didn’t spend every day of their lives thinking about whether or not the remaining population was about to be destroyed. she needed the freedom they gave her. 

it didn’t hurt that mj’s smile, when she gave it, could light up the entire compound all on its own. it also didn’t hurt that ned had managed to teach himself about wakandan tech in the two years that their country had been slowly opening up to the rest of the world. having someone who actually understood the things she talked about and the projects she wanted to work on - it was amazing.

it didn’t hurt that they held the same pain in their eyes that shuri did.

but then someone would ask her a question, or shuri would end up in a conference room talking to what was left of the united nations, and the mask would be on again.

and soon enough, the mask was back to being more constant than her own face. the gentle, diplomatic smile, the lilt in her voice that had never come naturally, the careful negotiations that she had to wade through without her brother to guide her - she found herself drowning in them. mountains of paperwork slowly began to cover the table she had taken over, and for all her intelligence, shuri only knew what a quarter of it meant. she’d even started taking her meals there, bent over papers and plans or on sneaking bites of sandwiches mid-conference call.

she didn’t miss the concern in okoye’s eyes, the way colonel rhodes tried to explain things to her gently as possible, or the pause in the avenger’s throats before they asked her opinions. she’d come to appreciate the cautious way ms. potts stepped in when she deemed the stress too much for a woman so young. when that happened, she’d slip away, back to spider-man’s rooms and curl up in the big bed until she could muster the energy to fix the mask back into place.

(that part got harder each day.)

shuri missed wakanda. she missed her people and her lab. she missed her friends. 

she missed her mother and t'challa. 

at night, she was brought back to that horrible day. she was being thrown over the balcony again, was feeling the bones in her arm crack under the pressure of her body. (nothing a few hours in her prototype healing pod couldn’t fix, but painful for every second that she’d lay there in fear.) she ran through the palace to her mother, crashing into her just before her mother’s legs crumbled underneath her, grabbing at ash as it blew away on the breeze. she was listening to okoye talk, staring at the projected image of her brother as he too dissipated into nothing.

_ “come, okoye, this is no place to die…” _

shuri would wake in a cold sweat. each night it grew harder to sleep.

the mask hid all of it though. she could hear t'challa’s name without flinching, now, could see the images projected before her again and again without tears filling her eyes. she could be strong for her people. she had to be, after all.

in any case, the others had it worse. tony stark never seemed to sleep either, but he was starting to look wearier with each passing day. banner, on the other hand, seemed to have taken up sleeping as his newest hobby, if the sheer amount of time he spent in his rooms meant anything. thor was usually with Banner, or out on the grounds, pretending to be alright.

clint barton spent all of his time with his children - he never let them out of his sight. to be fair, he never let the black widow out of his sight either. it was like he was sure that if he looked away, they’d disappear.

the one time shuri had managed to speak to captain rogers, he’d been on his way to train. he’d muttered something about sam and bucky and disappeared into the gym, not coming back out for hours. 

( _b_ _ ucky _ . shuri’s heart seized in her chest - he had come to be like a brother to her too, and now he was gone as well, and she was left here, alone, with no family left.)

heck, ned had also lost his entire family, save for two sisters who’d gone far away as soon as they could. he couldn’t seem to do much of anything for a long, long while, and even now he’d taken up spending all his time in the labs. 

mj tried to hide how much she was hurting, but shuri saw her cracked, bleeding knuckles and the bags under her eyes that seemed to be eternally getting darker. even though the work that pepper potts assigned her seemed to be helping, there were still moments when shuri could clearly see the hurt in her eyes - every time she turned to say something to a person who wasn’t there, or moved to check her phone that was eternally silent, mj seemed to collapse inward just a little.

so shuri found herself forcing a smile onto her face more often than not, pretending she was getting better in front of the others.

so what if she was breaking as she turned away? that’s what the mask was for.


	4. dissolve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dissolve (dəˈzälv)  
> verb  
> to slowly disappear or end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> molly says this is the worst chapter by Far so, uh, there's that? sorry yall i still have many many infinity war feels

liz was walking to her dorm when it happened.

one moment, she was fine - she was laughing at a text that she’d gotten from michelle, clutching her organic chemistry textbook to her chest and debating whether to change into pajamas for her study group in half an hour. the next moment, her hand was turning to ash before her eyes, her phone and textbook falling to the floor. she stared, unsure as to what it meant. michelle’s name fell from her lips and then she was just…

_ gone. _

it was weird. liz had always figured dying would feel like something - painful, maybe, or at least a last desperate gasp for air before her life faded away- but she didn’t feel _anything_. she was reminded of a quote from harry potter (and yeah, sure, her new friends would tease her about liking a children’s book, but michelle said it held up in most ways except the author being “a meddler who needs to just let go and let the fandom handle things” so she didn’t care.)

_ “it’s quicker and easier than falling asleep _ .” 

liz had never been very good at falling asleep quickly, especially not after her father’s arrest. she always ended up staying up until early in the morning, staring at the ceiling or reading books with burning eyes as sleep evaded her. in comparison, dying, if that was what this was, was like nothing. it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.

(that wasn't saying much - not much in her short life had been easy.)

liz next woke in foggy field, surrounded by people. thousands upon thousands of people. and some weren’t even human, were what liz could only presume were aliens, and every single one looked terrified.

liz was terrified.

she looked around for familiar faces, and  _ there _ . _there_  was her organic chem teacher, hands covered in ink stains like they always were when he was grading papers. and _there_ was michelle's dad, staring blankly at the ground in front of his feet with his hand still held in front of him as if he’d just been holding a glass. and _there_ was her cousin, ethan, in footie pajamas and looking around in confusion.

for every face that liz recognized, a dozen more appeared that she didn’t. every time she tried to reach for them, she was pushed out of the way by terrified people searching for their own loved ones, and she just kept losing hers.

someone grabbed her arm, and liz screamed. 

she screamed like she should have the moment she disappeared, screamed so loudly that her throat ached with the effort. the person - alien? she hadn’t looked, she didn’t know - tried to shush her, pulling her from the ever moving crowd but liz couldn’t bring herself to stop.

just a moment ago, she’d been a college student at mit. now she didn't even know where she was. now she was alone, and lost, and so, so scared. 

but then she looked up, looked at who’d grabbed her, and god damn, she never would have imagined being relieved to see flash fucking thompson but she yanked him into a hug so tight that he wheezed for breath. but instead of complaining like he should have, flash hugged her back, and then so did betty and sally and almost all of her old decathlon team, and liz was pretty certain she’d entered an alternate dimension. because they were supposed to be in new york, and she was supposed to be in massachusetts, and she hadn't seen them since her disastrous senior year. (she'd kept in touch, of course she had, but it wasn't the same as seeing them face to face.)

the problem was, no one was quite sure where they were. no one knew what had happened to them. 

flash and betty told her about the bus they’d been on, about the alien spaceship and ned’s screams and then peter just  _ disappearing _ . (liz couldn’t even find it in herself to be surprised by that news. it seemed like whenever there was trouble, peter couldn’t be found anywhere in sight.) they told her about the bus turning around to return to school, about how sally and betty were on a date when they melted away, how flash was mid-video game, how abe was helping his older brother write a college essay.

liz told them about being mid-step, about michelle’s forever unanswered text, about her biology final that would remain un-studied for. 

the entire time, they stared at the crowd, searching for more familiar faces with dread pooling in their stomachs. (or maybe that was just liz. she wasn’t sure and she didn't bother to ask.) 

_ there _ was principal morita, hand still posed as if mid-phone call. _there_  was her father, still wearing his prison jumpsuit and looking around in confusion. _there_ , liz swore that was peter wearing a spider-man suit, reaching towards someone in the crowd. each familiar face was a stone resting in the pit of liz’s stomach, and she was so, so torn between jumping back into the fray to grab them or letting them disappear into the crowd. 

abe laughed tentatively at something sally said, flash dropped to the ground and buried his head in his hands, betty muttered under her breath and anxiously tangled her fingers in her long blonde hair. 

liz dropped to the ground beside flash and stared at the sea of desperate people. it was starting to hit her more and more with each passing moment. she had watched herself disintegrate into nothing, had watched herself  _ die _ and not felt a thing. she was dead.

she was  _ dead. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos are what keep me going!!! xx


	5. conviction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> conviction (kənˈvikSH(ə)n)  
> noun  
> a firmly held belief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, warning, there's brief (really brief) mention of suicide in the second paragraph so just be careful.
> 
> i accidentally turned this gay and I'm really not sorry about it? however it's, like, a sentence so you could probably ignore it if you really, really hate peterned. (but also, WHY WOULD YOU peterned/interwebs is so perfect and pure??) 
> 
> also let me know if you have any questions about the paragraph with all of the objects, my beta and i realized some of them are pretty vague.

when ned was nine, his grandfather had a heart attack and died in the middle of the night. he’d been distraught at the time - this was the man who had first taught him science and math, even before he’d gone to school, who’d defied every stereotype by being the most computer-savvy member of their family and passing all his knowledge onto ned. the boy hadn’t cried much, but he’d locked himself in his room for days. when he finally came out, it was only after he’d taught himself to hack into the independent living community’s security cameras and see his grandfather one more time.

ned was thirteen when his cousin killed herself. he’d sat through the funeral and then gone over to peter’s house, where he’d then spent six hours sobbing through star trek reruns and eating ice cream out of the tub. then he went home and spent four days building an alarm system into each of his siblings’ rooms and the bathroom to alert him if something happened to them, just in case.

when he was fourteen, peter’s uncle ben died, and for the first time ned had to be the shoulder to cry on. he hugged peter and brought food over for him and may and helped peter get dressed for the funeral when he couldn’t find the energy to even get out of bed. then he’d gone home and built three robots in the span of a week and hacked into the nypd's records every day until the mugger was caught. 

when ned leeds lost someone, he made himself busy with projects. it was what he did.

so at mj and shuri’s insistence he quietly inserted himself into banner and stark’s daily playtime (or at least, that was what stark called them) in the big robotics lab. it took a little convincing but ned was able to help the scientists with smaller projects, staying late into the night until both of them had retired to their rooms. (or, in the case of tony, the kitchen or the theater or the gym until he finally passed out on the couch in the common area from complete exhaustion while still fully clothed.)

and then ned would pull out the files on peter’s suit.

finding said files hadn’t been easy. he’d searched and searched and had to convince friday that he wasn’t going to hurt mr. stark, that the man didn’t need to know, that it would just make him more upset. 

(all of those things were true, but friday didn’t take kindly to people hacking her boss’ system, for obvious reasons.)

once he’d found them, ned read them backwards and forwards and backwards again until he knew every single update stark had ever made to to the suit. he found copies of peter’s notes on web fluid and studied them just as well, even though chemistry was a field in which ned wasn’t particularly gifted. he sketched and he tinkered and he made his own notes, until the holograms that held them spanned the entire workshop when pulled up all at once.

he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing, didn’t dare mention the reason he’d stumble to bed at four or five in the morning and brush off the girls’ concern with an overly cheerful grin.

he didn’t want to admit it to them.

but mj was observant and shuri was skilled so at four in the morning they found him in the lab, a month after what was now being referred to as the ‘thanos incident’ if it was referred to at all. 

(as if such words didn’t hold so much meaning, didn’t refer to his best friend’s last moments, didn’t refer to Peter’s dying sobs and whispers of  _ “i’m sorry” _ and  _ “mr. stark, i don’t wanna go,”  _ and  _ “i don’t feel so good.” _  ned wasn’t meant to know about those, but friday had her ways and she took pity on the desperate teenager who just wanted to know how his best friend had died.)

ned was crying. 

it was something he did a lot now. he’d taught himself to sob silently, to not make a sound or a movement, so no one noticed even as mj used his shoulder as a pillow during their star wars marathon. (peter wouldn’t see solo, wouldn’t get to scream over it with him, wouldn’t share his thoughts on donald glover’s performance, and it  _ hurt so much _ .)

ned had decided to take the plunge, was the thing. after ages of reading, of writing, of teaching himself everything that peter had already learned, he’d sat down and built a pair of web shooters. without thinking, he’d added a few adjustments, some improvements that peter had discussed with him the night before that field trip, right before they fell asleep on the phone as they so often did. he’d found a canister of web fluid in a cupboard and inserted it easily and then fallen apart, right there in the middle of tony stark’s robotics lab.

and that was where mj and shuri had found him. 

shuri had disappeared for some cocoa ( _ not cocoa, he and peter drank cocoa every time they were upset, but he couldn’t find the words to tell her no _ ) and mj slid herself onto the table, shoved the web shooters away, and hugged ned.

it wasn’t the first time she’d hugged him, but it was the first that she hadn’t held back, hadn’t kept a little bit of herself guarded, and that made ned cry harder - at least a little because  _ damn _ she gave hugs almost as well as peter.

shuri brought back two steaming mugs of cocoa and a peanut butter milkshake - “made by clint, no questions asked” - and rubbed his back while they waited for ned’s tears to stop.

he managed to explain around choked sobs, to tell them about the long nights and the desperate drive to do this. then he said the words that made all the three of them pause.

“they need to be here if he comes back,” he said, and, well. that was just it wasn’t it?

that was what they were all hoping for - that there was some way to reverse the damage that thanos had caused. it was the reason that the avengers worked tirelessly to come up with plans, was the reason that mj worked with pepper potts to come up with contingency plans and do research for hours every day, was the reason shuri kept a black panther suit she wasn’t sure she even wanted to wear tucked away in the bottom of her suitcase. it was, on some days, the only thing that kept anyone in compound going.

but ned was the first to say it out loud. and that was just about the most heartbreaking thing in the world. 

the thing was, he loved peter so damn much. he didn’t think it was just as a best friend anymore, didn’t know when it had gone beyond that, but he did. the thought of living life without him - no, the  _ actual feeling _ of living life without him, without the person who’d been by his side since they were six years old, hurt him down to the very core.

he had to keep hoping, or else there was just nothing left. 

if there was nothing left, he would give up entirely.

ned refused to do that, not if there was even a slight chance that peter would come back.

mj and shuri finally convinced him to drink his milkshake, sipping on their cocoa with sad, tired eyes that were far too old for people so young. when they finished, shuri carefully put the web shooters into a box, and mj led ned to bed. shuri would soon put the shooters away on the top shelf of the closet, right next to the suitcase with her brother’s suit and the lego set with ned’s name on it, and mj’s laptop with all its pictures of her father and the decathlon team and liz saved on the hard drive. it belonged with the things they couldn’t bear to see, not now.

(eventually, it would be joined by stark’s suit he wore on titan, by a leaf in a glass box, and a medallion once belonging to loki. they would join ranks with an old space pirate’s jacket, a green and purple ring on a chain, and a broken blaster. there was a handful of wiring, a pair of tall, worn leather boots, shuri’s mother’s necklace, a headwrap, a wing-pack. there were large round glasses, and a wedding ring tucked into a pile of small baby toys; an old comms set and a Stark Industries security badge with the name “Happy Hogan” scrawled across it, and an old metal arm with a red star scratched off of the shoulder. the closet in peter’s rooms became a memorial to those that had been lost and would someday, hopefully, be found.)

ned started to spend less time in the labs, less time concentrating on projects, until his hands would shake again and he’d have to join banner and stark. he started to go to bed when the others did, started to only look at his notes when shuri and mj were in the room. instead, he switched tactics, hacking into security and speakers to listen in on avengers meetings and make his own deductions with what little information they gathered. he would find where thanos was on his own if he had to, would fight the alien himself if it meant the possibility of getting peter back.

every few days he shared what he’d figured out with barton or banner, who would take it to the team without disclosing where they’d got the ideas, and slowly, ever so slowly, the heroes began making headway on finding thanos. 

ned could sleep at night now. he’d done as much with his project as he could, at least for the moment.

if he had anything to say about it, peter parker would come home.


	6. phantasm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> phantasm (ˈfanˌtazəm)  
> noun  
> a figment of the imagination; an illusion or apparition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y e e t

as a kid, michelle suffered from night terrors that kept her awake for long hours in the middle of the night. she never remembered any of them, but she did remember the hoarseness in her throat from the screams, the sheer terror when she finally opened her eyes that kept her trapped beneath her sheets, and the tired and aching eyes as she refused to fall asleep.

when she got older those night terrors turned into nightmares that spawned after her mother walked out. for years, she found herself crawling into her father’s bed with tears covering her tanned cheeks, but eventually she had taught herself to suffer through it. big girls didn’t cry, after all, especially not those fighting corrupt governments. (or at least, that was what she told herself every time the feeling welled up in her throat.)

those nightmares had faded by the time she hit high school, but after the so-called thanos incident, they’d returned full force. more nights than not she had found herself rolling out of bed and wiping hot tears from her cheeks. she’d curl up on the couch for hours, staring blankly at the walls until shuri or sometimes ned woke up and joined her.

whispers of her father’s quiet “oh” circled through her ears for hours, echoing around in the background of her nightmares as she pictured everyone she loved disappearing into nothingness. (not so far from the truth, not anymore.) 

she imagined the purple alien that the avengers had described watching her, laughing cruelly before snapping his massive fingers. 

she dreamed of him staring into her eyes as he did it; of watching peter crumble away; of liz’s hands turning to ash in her own; of ned opening his mouth to scream and floating away on the wind before the sound could escape; of shuri’s dumbstruck look before she too disapearred. 

she would take those dreams a thousand times over her others. 

there were ones where, instead of them peacefully disappearing, she watched while tied to a chair as thanos and alien battalions crushed and slashed her friends to pieces. those dreams were filled with blood and screams and she often woke breathless and terrified, curling close to shuri and ned or calling upon friday for views of the others in the compound, until she was sure that everyone was alive and safe and not being crushed under a massive hand. 

(admittedly, she had no clue what thanos looked like, so her mental image of him was exaggerated even beyond the words of the heroes. ned and tony refused to let her see the recording of peter’s death, so that, too, was left to be warped and exaggerated by her imagination.)

most nights, ned slept hard through her nightmares, unless a scream escaped her throat that even michelle’s careful training couldn’t keep inside. shuri, however, proved to be a light sleeper. normally, when michelle slipped out of bed and padded into the living area, she wasn’t far behind. shuri would curl herself around michelle as her shoulders shook with silent sobs, carding her thin fingers through michelle’s wild curls until she could breathe again and was no longer staring, haunted at the image of liz’s terrified face looking back at her that burned into the back of her eyelids.

nighttime may have brought horrors she could barely face, but daytime was steadily becoming a bustle of activity as the avengers worked to make a plan to reverse the effects of thanos’ tyranny. none of them expected ned and michelle to do much. they were just kids - highly intelligent, passionate kids, but ones without powers or parents and with homeschooling to do in order to keep up with their classes back home.

what no one had counted on was sheer determination. alongside her internship under pepper - which was somewhere between an actual internship and peter’s “internship” - michelle found herself at ned’s side as he theorized and hypothesized, at shuri’s table as she helped her pour over plans and negotiations. 

she became close to colonel rhodes ( _“seriously, you call me rhodey, i'll call you mj. colonel rhodes makes me feel old.”_ ) and to natasha, both of which were well-versed in international relations, and rocket and nebula, who were well-versed in the rest of the universe. michelle, for her part, was well-versed in quiet interrogation, in asking people questions without them realizing she’d even asked. and yes, natasha would smile knowingly at every answer, but still michelle felt confident in her own abilities - though perhaps with people who weren’t super-spy-assassins. 

as time went on, she threw herself into this work, even as she was exhausted from getting increasingly less amounts of sleep. it wasn’t rare to find her hunched over, mid-power nap. shuri found her that way often when she emerged from her conference room, and would gently put away the things she was working on or wake her up, depending on how long she’d been up the night before. 

it was commonplace to find the two girls in a central area, michelle asleep in shuri’s lap with a book on her chest as the other girl worked. it was equally common for ned to join them, sprawled nearby with a laptop and look of intense concentration.

hope of a solution grew closer, grew more real with every day and michelle did everything she could to encourage that goal. 

_ someday, _ she promised herself during those rare days that hope didn’t seem so foolish and no nightmares had plagued her the night before,  _ someday I will hug liz and peter and my dad and the team again. someday this will all be over. someday this will be fixed. _

unfortunately, for now michelle was living in a nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up.


	7. tenacity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tenacity (təˈnasədē)  
> noun  
> the quality or fact of being able to grip something firmly; grip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahahaha pain
> 
> also this might be the last update for a month or two, kiddos! i'm going out of the country for the next three weeks as of Wednesday and i start college (holy shit) in august. howe v e r there's like, really a plot now, so this is nOt being abandoned. please please stick around for me <3 <3 <3
> 
> also if you haven't guessed by now i am so s o bad at writing shuri  
> also also if you get multiple emails about updates for some reason, i'm adding chapter summaries lol

shuri was not immune to the tragedies of battle.

she grew up surrounded by the dora milaje, looked up to nakia and okoye as a young child while the pair of them engaged in their separate but equally brutal battles. she’d watched her brother as black panther - hell, she’d been the driving force behind many of her country’s weapons designs, including her brother’s suit, and even jumped into battle herself. 

shuri was well-versed in the inevitability of battle, but before her father’s death she’d never imagined becoming a part of them. 

sometime in the past two years, war had been dropped into shuri’s lap, all tied up neatly with a bow on top, and she didn’t want it. 

she didn’t want the blood and the bodies, the screams of her people as they died. she didn’t want to watch as they fell trying to defend themselves, their country, the  _ world _ . (but god, she’d take it all just as long as there  _ was _ a body. the image of her brother disappearing into ash right before okoye’s eyes haunted her dreams. there had been nothing to bring home and lay to rest. at least with her father there had been a body.)

okoye was due at the compound soon. shuri had lost track of time - she didn’t know how soon that might be, anymore.

the thing was, shuri hadn’t intended to be gone for more than a week. the moment that she’d finished arranging funerals and heard the avengers were packing up to return home, she’d know she had to get on that plane. she was so young, so tired and strung out already that okoye had sent her off with a couple of dora at her side, just to keep an eye out, and a promise to pick her up personally in a week.

shuri’d kept putting off the pick-up until the country was running mostly by itself, until she there were far less reparations to be done and things were returning to as close to normal as they could be worldwide. now, more than a month later, a part of her ached for her lab, for her home, but she felt  _ useful _ here in the compound. she was helping to find thanos, to rebuild a world left ravaged by the loss of half of its people, to fix things in a way she never could have if she was still in wakanda.

(she didn’t have to walk through the halls of the palace with no mother, no nakia, no bucky or t'challa in sight. she didn’t have to remember all she’d lost, to see the empty places where her family should have been.)

okoye had been understanding, but if shuri was to stay at the compound any longer, the general would have to be there to watch out for her. a part of the princess was grateful, excited to see okoye, but more of her was aching at the thought of seeing someone who so strongly represented home.

(okoye was t'challa's bodyguard, not shuri's. shuri'd had her own bodyguard - one who'd fallen in the battle with the aliens, far before the snap had even come. it felt wrong to be hers now.)

her current dora guards were often patrolling the grounds or staying just out of sight - okoye would do no such thing. it wouldn't help that the woman was to serve as both guard and guardian while shuri was still underage, which meant that she had every right to  _ hover _ as she was so prone to doing. and yes, alright, that was her job as the leader of the dora milaje, but it was still so  _ much _ when all shuri wanted was to be left alone. 

(well, alone plus mj and ned, who were basically an extension of herself at this point. rarely was she seen without at least mj at her side, curling against her with a book in hand as shuri worked on yet another form or design. but that was different. _mj_  was different.)

there was the other small problem that the arrival of okoye would mark the end of shuri’s insistence that she was fine. because mj and ned may send each other concerned glances but they didn’t dare push and the adults would gently remind her to take breaks but generally took her at her word, but okoye wouldn’t. she’d known shuri for too long and knew how to recognize the signs of something wrong in the girl’s eyes - the small slump of her shoulders when no one could see, the clenched fingers underneath tables, the smiles that were a little too sharp to be genuine. okoye was well-versed in the language of shuri, and would not allow her exhaustion and stress and grief to be brushed aside so easily. 

and that was what it was, wasn’t it? In the short span of two years shuri really had lost everything. she could barely remember when her family was truly whole, when her heart didn’t ache at the sight of news reports rehashing the same tragic story she'd been living. her father’s voice was starting to fade from her memory, and that hurt so much that she didn’t want to even think about it. 

(shuri wished that bucky and t'challa and her mother’s voices would fade along with it, but every night whispers of “steve?” and “this is no place to die!” and “shuri, run, before it’s too late!” still echoed in her ears each night and she regretted ever watching the recordings from rogers and okoye.)

(she regretted not doing more to stop thanos from getting the mind stone.

(she regretted letting her fear and pain get the best of her during the battle.)

(she regretted everything.)

(no one had been near nakia when she died. there wasn’t even a video clip to remember her by.)

somehow - the details were fuzzy, every meeting running together in a big soupy mental mess that was unlike anything level-headed shuri had ever experienced before - they’d narrowed the location of thanos down to two islands, both on the far side of the galaxy. (and god, did that feel weird to say.) the raccoon-alien man, rocket, promised it really wasn’t a lengthy journey - a mere week or two at most, if things went well and they were able to take all the shortcuts uninterrupted. of course, things rarely ever seemed to go well for this particular group, but no one was saying that.

well, okay, _nebula_ was saying it, but she seemed to be generally rather pessimistic so the rest of the team was doing their best to steadfastedly ignore her angry mumbles.

the others were preparing to go to battle, and shuri was stuck debating on whether she would join them. 

on the one hand it was her responsibility as leader of wakanda and official holder of the title of black panther to go. it was a chance to avenge her brother, to finish the war he’d been fighting. it was a chance to avenge bucky, to make someone else suffer for all the pain he’d had. it was a chance to avenge her mother, who had done nothing to deserve her fate. and yet...

and yet shuri was still young, and she was scared.

she longed for her mother’s embrace, her brother’s laugh, nakia’s quiet words of encouragement. she knew what okoye would say - she had a duty to her people and to the world. but what about her father? would he want to protect his daughter from the evils of the world? 

(it was too late for that. she’d lost that small bit of innocence left when that building had blown up with t'challa and her father inside and only one of them had come out alive. she’d lost it the first time she’d nearly died in battle.) 

but how could she not fight? how could she run away, hide out in the compound where it was safe while others went out to die for her people?

she coudn’t, was the thing. shuri squared her shoulders and headed for the runway. t'challa’s face flashed through her mind. he would have died for her. she had to be willing to die for him in return.


	8. yearning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yearning (ˈyərniNG)  
> noun  
> a feeling of intense longing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who's back, back again
> 
> hi hello scandinavia is freaking lovely in the summertime did yall know?? it made returning to florida really really difficult. sorry for the short chapter after making you wait so long - i really wanted to get something to yall, so i started writing basically as soon as the jetlag wore off.
> 
> also my beta hates this chapter so... whoops

liz had never really listened to gossip. gossip was petty, it caused unnecessary drama and tears and heartbreak. she’d seen entire friend groups fall apart because of a misheard whisper in the locker room or cafeteria. she’d watched girls torn to shreds inside a rumor mill that had little regard for the feelings of those caught inside the machination.

but it was hard to not hear things.

there were whispers. whispers that swept between the trees, across the sandy desert and the grassy plains, whispers that spread through cities that had stood waiting for people to fill them, that bounced from house to house in the mismatched and messed up suburb where liz had settled with her friends. whispers that they were trapped inside something called the “soul stone,” that the titan-sized alien-god thanos had snapped his fingers and dissipated half of the universe in mere seconds and called it a mercy. whispers that there was a way to get home, and that the avengers were working on a solution.

she didn’t let herself get her hopes up. only a few of the heroes had been spotted here, and lord knew what had happened to the others. there had been rumors of scarlet witch helping mountain towns build upwards, of a tree man walking alongside king t'challa through one of the desert cities. but there was no word of thor, or captain america, or iron man. flash had oncerun back into the house after leaving for a walk, screaming about spotting spiderman, his shoulders shaking with unshed tears at the sight of queens' favorite hero.

liz’s heart had broke a little at that news, but she simply squared her shoulders and helped abe make cookies to leave on the roof for him every few days.

(and what even were days, anymore? time seemed to go weirdly here - the sun wouldn’t set for what should be days, and then it would seem to be going up and then down every few moments. sometimes whole hours seemed to go missing without a trace.)

in fact, liz did everything she could to keep the constant fear hidden beneath the surface, to keep pretending like she wasn’t terrified every time she pressed her hand to her chest and didn’t feel a steady beat beneath her skin.

instead she’d smile and laugh at the half-hearted jokes sally made, every snarky comment from flash and whispered suggestion from abe or betty. and if her hands shook underneath the kitchen table, well, no one would be the wiser.

night (or rather, the times that they slept, because night seemed to be as unwieldy as day) came hard for liz, though. she would toss and turn underneath blankets that seemed to suffocate, and her own dissolving hands would play before every time she closed her eyes. rare were the nights she got to sleep at all, instead spending her hours in bed praying that somehow, some way, her brain would shut down for even a few moments.

daytime, when she left the house - which was increasingly rare, the unpredictable world beyond the crooked doorframe too unusual even for her - liz spent her time searching, as most of the others did. 

her father, she’d discovered, was in a house in a suburb on the other side of the city from their own, huddled up with some of his men that had made it into the stone as well. 

she didn’t visit him.

peter was in the city their suburbs were huddled around, but rarely seemed to leave the apartment he’d set up for himself, even when liz and sally had come knocking. his aunt may was a few blocks away in an apartment of her own, and from what liz could tell, he was avoiding her too.

after that first time, she didn’t visit him either.

her cousins were a few towns away, in a large house with all the aunts and uncles who’d disappeared too. they called once, but she didn’t pick up.

she didn’t visit them either.

the ones she didn’t find were the ones that kept her up. her mother, mj, ned, most of her study groups, their names ran through her mind for hours on end. they could be alive, left behind to mourn liz and the others but they could have been lost - stuck in the wastelands, the deserts or forests with no clue that there was any civilizations just waiting for them to find. 

few people who had been lost found their way to a town or city or homestead or suburb. few that liz had heard of, anyway.

but when they arrived, they brought with them whispers of dreams into the realm of the living, of plans to destroy the alien-god and the soul stone and bring them all home. and as much as liz wanted to deny it, she was desperate for it to be true.

afterlife or not, liz wanted nothing more than to go home.


	9. fury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fury (ˈfyo͝orē)  
> noun  
> wild or violent anger; the reaching of a breaking point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 84 years later and I've returned with an Actual Final Chapter Count (actually, that might be a lie, there might be more, but as it stands, we're gonna have sixteen chapters meaning that we're about halfway through, and there's about two more 'arcs' left.) It mostly took me so long because I had to figure out where I was headed with this but I think I've actually got it now!! Yay!!!
> 
> me: ned is a soft angel boy who would never hurt a fly  
> also me: ned is Anger and he would kill for peter parker
> 
> also happy birthday to fern even though i doubt she reads this fic because i love my pal fer she's the Best

ned was not a spiteless person. he hated many things. 

he hated the way his siblings liked to mess with his projects, even when he begged them not to. 

he hated when his dad called and pretended like he hadn’t walked out and left his mom’s family to suffer in a life of poverty called single parenthood. his dad’s complete denial that there was anything different when he called had long since led to ned never picking up the phone. even now, the thought of whether or not his father was alive had only briefly crossed ned’s mind in the middle of his grief. he’d never bothered to pursue an answer.

he hated when peter went out on patrol and forgot to call him after, hated when he would spend all night worrying that he hadn’t come home alright and was dying in a ditch somewhere while ned sat on his computer playing video games to distract himself. 

(that one was particularly painful, because that was essentially what had happened, how he’d lost peter, and that stung. maybe if ned had just  _ stopped him _ for once, he would still be here.)

(ned knew that wasn’t how it worked, but it still hurt.)

he especially hated feeling powerless, and watching as shuri pulled her black panther suit out of her abandoned suitcase with shaking hands made him feel more powerless than ever.

for all of his formulas and planning and hypothesizing, there was nothing ned could do when it came to facing thanos. he had no powers, no super suit to protect his delicate flesh, no abilities beyond a brain that worked a little harder than most people's and a dead best friend who was a thousand times more special than ned would ever be. he was the guy-in-the-chair, but for the first time that truly seemed to mean nothing.

mj wrapped an arm around his shoulder as they watched shuri board the ship with the other avengers, and he wished he could go too. 

because outside of the boundaries of Earth, he couldn’t help them. he couldn’t connect to shuri’s suit, couldn’t hack into friday to talk to mr. stark - something the ai was increasingly lenient on, given his constant concern for its (her?) creator-slash-father figure. ned couldn’t  _ do _ anything from the compound except for wait for word of whether the remaining avengers had survived. 

and lord only knew how long that would take.

pepper promised to fill their days with things to do. after all, there was still schoolwork, still the messages he sent to his sisters in oklahoma every day, still running the entire stark company without giving away that stark himself had left the planet for the second time in a matter of months. 

but in those small moments in between, when things got too quiet without the constant arguing and training, when there was no princess-turned-queen curled up beside mj as the latter did her homework or god of thunder devouring whole cases of poptarts in the kitchen, that was when ned remembered. 

he’d close his eyes and remember a flash of peter’s smile, the hint of his laugh, the way his breath would brush across ned’s cheek when he leaned over his shoulder to look at his computer screen. the soft pressure of his head on ned’s shoulder as they marathoned _star trek: the next generation_ for the eightieth time, and peter dozed off in the middle of it. the dark tan of ned’s skin next to peter’s hand, pink and pale from too much time spent inside or covered by the suit, but rough with callouses all the same. ned would remember, and his heart would ache and a fury would rise inside of him that some disgusting purple prune of a man who called himself a god had dared to steal that away from him.

he wanted to  _ stop  _ him, to lead the charge, to wipe the stupid being’s smirk off of his face himself with the fury of a thousand teenagers whose  ~~ crushes ~~ best friends had been carelessly stolen away as if they had never mattered to anyone. and instead he was stuck doing calculus assignments with mj. 

it stung.

and so each day while they were gone, he wrote. his fingers flew over the keys of his laptop as he typed out angry letters to thanos, to stark for protecting him when he couldn’t save peter, to pepper and mj for keeping him at the compound when he had wanted to throw himself onto the ship, to peter for dying while ned couldn’t do anything to stop it. 

he draw angry drawings, things that he threw into shredders the moment he was done.

(mostly because, for one thing, he couldn’t draw, and mj would have just made fun of him if she saw them. also, because even he was embarrassed by the furious scribbles covering endless sheets of paper. there were only so many ways to scratch out himself punching thanos in the face before he started to feel like an overambitious kindergartener.)

ned wrote up plans to destroy thanos that would never work and definitely never help. he drew up diagrams for peter’s suit and additions to show shuri when she got back. (the ‘if’ that remained that clung to the sentence remained resolutely ignored and unspoken.) he snuck into the lab instead of doing his english reading and made robotic axes for stark, made wings for the falcon that would likely never be worn, made a lethal garrote for mj hidden inside a chain earring and a knife for pepper to be disguised as a pen. 

he made weapons for himself that he would never dare use - a lasso disguised as a shoelace, a shuriken fidget spinner, a bracelet containing knives of his own. the anger was perhaps the biggest boost of creative that ned had ever had. he knew that with each addition a growing pile of weapons for his friends and the heroes alike, mj worried and pepper scribbled more furiously into her ever-present notebook, but, goddammit, he didn’t care.

ned was tired of being so fucking helpless. he was going to be useful, or die trying.


	10. fragility

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fragility (frəˈjilədē)  
> noun  
> the quality of being delicate or vulnerable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Transcript of a conversation between my beta and while she read this chapter below.
> 
> Molly: oh No  
> Molly: OH NO  
> Molly: SHE IS SO SAD WHY DO YOU DO THIS  
> Hanna: she is gay and her family is dead what did you expect  
> Molly: Okay, that's. fair. But I still hate you.

mj didn’t like to rely on other people. she had learned a long time ago that relying on others led to heartbreak. she’d relied on her mother, after all, and a lot of good that had done when she’d decided that being a parent was just too hard for her. she’d relied on her dad and he’d become a pile of dust before her eyes. 

relying on people got you hurt.

maybe that was why mj didn’t realize how much she had come to rely on shuri until she left. all of a sudden, it seemed to be a lot harder to do things that she used to find so easy. things like dealing with the night terrors, and reading her novels without getting distracted, and pretending that everything was fine. 

because shuri would calm her down when she woke up crying, and shuri would curl up beside her to do work while she read, and shuri would send her a soft smile when all mj wanted to do was curl up and cry.

without shuri, she could feel herself crumbling. suddenly, it was so much harder to be normal. it seemed that she was the opposite of ned - where he had exploded outward, into a furious being of chaos and over-productivity, she had intruded even further inward than she ever had before. she was drowning inside of herself, and it scared even her.

where was the confident, observant, independent person she had once been? somehow, that person was replaced by the sort of girl who needed someone at her side, the sort of girl who missed details, the sort of girl who  _ cried _ . it seemed more often than not mj found herself dissolving into tears at the most inconvenient times, and really, since when was  _ that _ a thing?

she had been rereading harry potter, the first book tucked between the pages of _the invisible man_ \- one of her and ned’s assignments from pepper, which mj had read and hated all the way back in eighth grade - when a particular quote had left her crying for half an hour. ned had remarked he didn’t think that chapter thirteen was particularly emotional, but there was a concern in his eyes that felt uncomfortable directed her way.

(a smile playing on liz’s lips over their facetime conversation.  _ “it takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends,” _ her only reply to mJ’s overly eloquent argument in support of pineapple on pizza. the heart-pounding, finger-tingling feeling that had followed, even as mj had rolled her eyes and called her out for quoting albus dumbledore and expecting it to win a debate.)

wiping down the screen of the laptop she’d taken from peter’s room and suddenly she was hit by a sense of painful nostalgia that had left her curled up in a ball for two hours, until friday had alerted her to pepper’s imminent arrival and she’d had to pretend nothing had happened.

(shuri helping her wipe dust off of all the computer screens in the compound as mj counted them - there were eighty-two separate computers throughout the entire compound, and that was frankly far too many when she knew that stark had technology that made them pretty much obsolete - her hand purposely bumping into mj’s. the stomach-fluttery feeling that had left her momentarily speechless before flipping shuri off and sparking a war of who could wipe more screens down faster.)

a laugh on a television screen, a rerun of fucking friends, made mj’s stomach sink and her heart drop to join it, and she’d found herself playing that ten seconds back over and over for five minutes straight.

(her father had loved friends. he’d tug her onto the couch to watch it with him, roasting ross and his all-around shittiness with her for episode after episode. his favorite character was joey, and he listened every time that mj insisted that he and chandler should have ended up together even though he was a staunch supporter of chandler and monica because she was talking and he loved to hear his daughter talk. he laughed along exaggeratedly with the laugh tracks every time.)

mj was becoming fragile, a shell of her former self. even helping take care of ant-man’s daughter and hawkeye’s kids didn’t cheer her up, not with all of their questions about when their parents were coming home that she didn’t have an answer to. eventually, she stopped dropping into their makeshift daycare, something she’d taken up doing at least once a day between schoolwork and forcing shuri to take breaks. 

seeing kids so clueless and innocent was painful.

it wasn’t until the start of the second week that the avengers (plus some) were gone that she was able to force herself out of her melancholy and into some semblance of normalcy. she started a routine - schoolwork in the morning, help pepper for an hour or two after lunch, drag ned out of the lab in the afternoon and don’t let him return until breakfast the next morning. put on a poker face, ignore the lack of news (any news, god, would they ever get any news?), don’t cry until she’s safely locked the bathroom doors and crawled into the shower at night. rinse and repeat.

the moments in between she went back to drawing, which she’d mostly set aside since the so-called thanos incident. she set up a studio in an abandoned room that she was pretty certain had been built with peter's lego habit in mind, given the number of shelves and tables and the bright yellow walls, and also the giant hogwarts castle next to the finally completed death star he’d done with ned that were both proudly displayed in cases in the center of the room. but it was perfect for art - it was big and airy, with a high ceiling and plenty of space to put up easels and lay out drop clothes and fill the many vacant drawers with art supplies. 

she’d have friday play dramatic music and live video of ned in the lab while she worked, just as a small reminder that she was still alive and not alone. 

her penchant for drawing people in crisis was coming in handy, as she covered canvases and papers as large as walls and the sides of wine cartons and anything else she could get her hands on with what she saw. she painted herself, broken and sobbing and clutching her phone to her chest. she drew ned bent over his work table, a mountain of weapons that he never would have touched before now growing up around him.

she painted what she thought liz had looked like in her final moments, her beautiful hands crumbling to dust. she painted shuri’s pained face looking so small as she boarded the ship that would take her so very far from their little blue planet. she painted mothers crying on news programs and small children being taken away from homes filled with ashen remains. she painted hawkeye's distant look when he was reminded of his lost wife and baby, cassie's confusion when she asked about her mother, ned's sobbing sisters, the decathalon team photo with smudged out images of most of the members. (flash, abe, betty, sally, and peter were left as nothing more than misty shadows lost to the ash, and that painting in particular made mj's heart  _ache._ )

she painted her father’s water glass falling to the floor, the background a blurry swirl of color and grays behind it, caught in the exact moment before it truly shattered.

mj was fragile, but she at least had a purpose.

and when shuri and liz were brought home (the ‘if’ in the back of her mind was smothered and suppressed, shoved aside in favor of a ‘when’ that was so much more confident than mj really felt) she would have something to show them. when the avengers won, and returned all the people that had been lost, she would have something to prove that it all had really happened, to show that those who had been lost were necessary to the people they’d left behind.

and if they failed, well, then she really hoped that thanos was ready to face the wrath of a fragile teenager with a broken heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos are the reason i live x


	11. resolute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> resolute (ˈrezəˌl(y)o͞ot)  
> adjective  
> admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this should have been out before but i was doing college orientation and figuring out classes and stuff so here we are. whoops. hope this is decent, given the shortness and the length of time i made yall wait. 
> 
> also this chapter is unbetaed because molly ALSO started college this week, so we're both super busy and i just needed to get this one up, but she's got a study group going on right now wHOOPS

shuri was a lot of things, but she was not small. she was furious and intelligent and wickedly clever, but she was not small. 

sitting in the spacecraft with the remaining avengers, the few aliens left behind, and okoye, all adults with a lifetime of experience that she would never have, shuri felt small for perhaps the first time in her entire life. she wondered, momentarily, how peter parker must have felt every time he got in over his head. she wondered if he had also felt the terror vibrating from every cell of his body at the thought of being so small.

the panther suit fit beautifully, of course it did, but it didn’t feel right. it felt like a second skin, but not  _ her _ skin. she was a fake, pretending to be something she wasn’t, and it was only a matter of time before she either got found out or killed in the process. 

okoye had tried to get her to stay, but it wasn’t an option. she had to finish what her family had started. 

if there was going to be a fight, she had to be there. for herself, for her friends, and, most importantly, for her people.

If mj’s stony face as she boarded the spaceship weighed heavy at the back of her mind, shuri ignored it. she was doing this  _ for _ MJ, for everyone else who was a victim of this goddamn war. she would be back, or maybe she wouldn’t, but that wasn’t what mattered. what mattered was that mj was safe back on Earth, with ned, and pepper, and the kids. what mattered was that even if things didn’t get better, they would be hard-pressed to find a way to get worse.

and with luck, shuri would still be around to see the outcome.

(what was luck anymore? she hadn't had 'good' luck in years.)

and wasn’t that the scary part? she was so fucking young, she could see it in the eyes of the others in the spacecraft every time they looked at her. she was merely a child in their eyes playing the part of a hero and she was flying towards her death. 

shuri doubted she’d ever thought about death so much. even when her father died, though she had mourned, the thought had never become so all-consuming as it was now. she supposed the difference lay in the inevitability of her own doom. 

no matter how hard she tried, there was not an outcome she could picture that involved her making it out alive. 

they’d practiced and prepared and tried so damn hard to predict every outcome, but shuri was a purveyor of logic. as far as logic was concerned, she was smaller, she was slower, she was inexperienced. she was strong, but nowhere near the others, nowhere near her brother, and she was young. there was a lot she could do, but nothing compared to the others; she felt like she would never be anything compared to the others. she was a dead woman walking.

but when she thought about staying behind, she realized it wasn’t an option. she’d think about the sleepy silent nights spent with mj when neither of them wanted to fall asleep, and she wanted to protect them. she’d think of the blank look in ned’s eyes when someone mentioned peter, and she wanted to fix it. there was a pain in her gut whenever she thought of not doing anything, of leaving her friends defenseless in return for just one more day with them.

it wasn’t worth it.

(it wasn’t fair.)

shuri didn’t even know what fair was, anymore.

fair wasn’t children dying for no reason. fair wasn’t children turning into soldiers. fair was children being orphaned by a war that no one had signed up for.

her country was filled with orphans, filled with babies with no parents, with teenagers taking over families that they had never been intended to raise. no amount of technological advancement would prevent that. no amount of science could turn back a clock so stubbornly set on the present track. they were so far ahead of the rest of the world, but that didn't mean anything to thanos and his stupid glove.

(she was one of those orphans, one of those teenagers with too much on her shoulders. she wanted nothing more than to go back to her lab in wakanda and never come back out.)

okoye’s steady presence for the long, long days spent on the ship was the only thing keeping shuri sane. she was never far away, always just on the other side of the room at the farthest. if asked, she would swear it was her job as a bodyguard, as a dora, to protect the queen, but shuri could see the concern and - dare she say it - fear in okoye’s eyes when she looked too long. 

it was strange to think that they only had each other left. 

the others kept to themselves on the ship. rocket the raccoon alternated between annoying nebula as she kept the craft on course and hanging off of thor. the original avengers rarely left each others’ sides - and with the drama that had gone down between them just a few years before, it was only slightly surprising that they clung to each other now. it seemed to be the consensus that they didn't want to lose each other yet again.

rhodes stuck close to stark most of the time, but he could often be found by himself, staring blankly at the passing stars. banner and thor had a habit of disappearing together, and steve alternated between alienating himself and not leaving stark’s side. 

they were all so broken by the battles. it was hard to believe they were heading for another.

shuri couldn’t even find it in herself to be amazed at the galaxy around them, the knowledge of where it lead weighing heavy on her small shoulders. hopefully, all would go well, and she would be able to marvel at the passing scenery.

the thought of returning to earth and bringing her brother back was keeping her upright. 

just a little longer, and this would all be over.

(hope was a luxury she could no longer afford. she had to be determined enough to make it happen.)


	12. crumble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> crumble (ˈkrəmbəl)  
> verb  
> to break or fall apart into small fragments, especially over a period of time as part of a process of deterioration; to disintegrate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry updates have been so slow, college is a full time gig yall lol 
> 
> molly was a little emotionally wrecked by this chapter but it's fIne

liz had gotten used to the odd sort of monotony that made up life inside the stone.

she and the others had discovered they didn’t need to eat, so, though she and abe still made food on a regular basis, it often went untouched. 

there was no money, and no need for jobs. stores sat open, waiting for their goods to be taken. after the first few days, no one bothered to loot them with any sort of violence. there was no point - there were no shopkeepers, no alarms, and almost always enough to share of anything you could want. when glass broke, no one came running.

there was no need for much of anything, in this eternal limbo they had fallen into. somehow, this made keeping everyone sane get harder.

liz watched flash spiral first. he started talking to himself, walking around listlessly and muttering. sometimes, she heard his sister’s name, or his parents', but mostly it seemed to be undecipherable nonsense. still, when liz spoke to him, he’d smile and laugh and seem almost normal, so maybe it was nothing to be worried about. 

(she worried anyway.)

sally was next. one day, she was fine, the next she violently flinched away from betty’s touch. she started spending her days curled up in the big, oversized armchair in the living room with a thick blanket wrapped around her shoulders, even though there was no way she was cold. she was plenty fine if spoken to, but… but no one could get within two feet of her without her flinching. she swore she was fine.

(liz heard her crying when no one else was around.)

then there was betty. she seemed to have the opposite reaction from her girlfriend, constantly attaching herself to people’s sides. she clung to liz, to flash, to abe. she would sit on the very edge of what sally had deemed a safe distance and cling to a blanket as if it was her, and if she was left alone too long, she would scream until someone placed their hand on her shoulder or hugged her close again. otherwise, she seemed fine, would brush off any concerned glances with a wave of her hand. but she never slept more than an hour unless someone was beside her.

(liz spent many sleepless nights sitting next to betty so she could catch a few hours of rest before the screaming started again.)

abe was last. if betty and sally were meant to mirror each other, so too did abe and flash, for abe suddenly stopped speaking. he was mid-sentence, helping liz with dinner, when suddenly his mouth snapped shut so hard she could hear his teeth click. nothing that liz did could make him open up again. nothing anyone did could bring back his voice. he still smiled, still laughed, still nodded and wrote down answers to questions as if this was normal, but he wouldn’t - or maybe couldn’t - respond.

(liz missed his sarcastic responses to flash’s mutterings, the ones that kept her laughing.)

liz was the last one left, and she could feel her own hold slipping. she didn’t know how much longer she would last like this. her brain pounded against her skull regularly, beating out a rhythm she didn’t dare try to decipher. at night - whatever that was anymore - she would curl her toes and bite her lips and count backwards f rom one hundred until she could feel herself returning to some semblance of normal. 

(whatever normal was.)

any longer and she would fall apart.

just as she thought it was over, just as she thought she was done for, it happened.

the tingling started in her toes, moving upwards. it was like her legs were going numb, falling asleep from being sat on too long while studying, except the sensation moved up her body and down her fingers and into her head and face. 

and there was a scream that she recognized as sally, but she couldn’t turn to look. 

and then betty, who’d been sitting on the couch as close to a softly muttering flash as physically possible, started to disintegrate. liz was reminded of hands turning to ash, and opened her mouth to scream, only to find that she  _ couldn’t. _

she watched her own body crumble into dust for the second time, and closed her eyes.

whatever came next had to be better than what she was leaving behind.


	13. parallel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> parallel (/ˈperəˌlel/)  
> noun  
> a person or thing that is similar or analogous to another

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE'RE IN THE HOME STRETCH FOLKS SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG

the first sign that something was off came from the screaming. 

ned was half-asleep in the big bed, curled up beside mj, when he heard it, a hair-raising scream that echoed off of the walls of the compound. his body shot upwards, his hands curling into fists, tears already forcing themselves into his eyes. mj was already awake, shoving herself off of the bed with shaky hands and wide eyes, ready to fight. ned’s heart was pounding in his chest.

the last time he heard screaming like that, half the universe had died.

but this was different.

the next thing ned knew, he was staring, wide eyed, at the projection of billions of people suddenly returning to earth as if nothing had happened. there were tragedies, of course - those on planes fell out of the sky, and there were only a few mutants able to slow their descent, for example - but they were  _ back _ . 

ned’s brother, james, answered his frantic phone call in desperate tears, blubbering about a dream-like world of limbo that sucked the air from his chest. ken and his wife called next, their eyes still clouded over with shock through the screen of their phones. with each returning face, a little piece of ned became whole. with each text, call, message, he remembered what it was like to breathe.

(peter still didn’t answer, and there wasn’t even a message from karen, but ned tried not to think about him trapped on an unknown planet with near-strangers with no way to get home.)

he still refused to go home until he knew peter was safe.

and maybe that was stupid of him. he should have been thrilled, should have leapt at the chance to go home and wrap his arms around his siblings and his mother and his step-father again, but he couldn’t just  _ leave _ . 

he couldn’t just let peter come back to compound and not find out how much ned cared about him.

so he stayed, and surprisingly, so did mj. the pair of them stuck close to pepper - pepper, who had looked out for them when no one else did, who had called laura barton and ant-man’s ex and brought them to their children, who had been so strong when it would have been so much easier to collapse. they spent much of their time trailing her, waiting for news about shuri and peter with breathless anticipation.

the day peter came back was the day ned finally started living again. 

he found out mere moments before the ship landed, was already out the door and halfway to the runway before the words finished leaving friday’s speakers. peter was the third person off the ship, after tony stark and steve rogers, but ned only had eyes for him. 

he looked exhausted, bags under haunted eyes darker than anything ned have ever seen. but the moment he saw ned, a grin broke out onto his face and he started running.

it wasn’t a particularly comfortable hug, all grappling hands and elbows knocking into each other. ned didn’t know when he started crying, just that there were tears and snot all over his face and the front of peter’s (totally badass new) spider suit, that peter’s tears were covering his hair and his shoulder and his neck, and he should definitely think it was gross but he was just glad to have his best friend here and safe and  _ alive _ . 

and suddenly, like a fucking movie scene, peter’s lips were on ned’s and his hands were fisted in his hair and ned only had time to think  _ “holy fuck I’m kissing peter fucking parker” _ and then  _ “holy fuck I’m kissing spiderman” _ before peter was shoving him away and looking horrified and embarrassed and apologetic and sad. ned wasn’t sure why, just that he didn’t want to see peter looking like that ever again, so he hauled him back in and this time it was all salty and desperate and it felt like both the last time they could ever do this, and the first time they would of many. 

it felt like home. 


	14. intact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> intact (inˈtakt)  
> adjective  
> not damaged or impaired in any way; complete

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI im sorry its been so long, mj was really fighting me on getting this finished. that being said, i swear to god i'm going to finish this fic before endgame comes out, and my roommates are holding me to this so yeah.
> 
> s/o as always to molly for being my beta, and also to roomie liz for playing a bunch of angsty songs on her uke while i was writing this a midnight.  
> also s/o to me for writing this instead of sleeping despite my 9am class and then two other classes and then therapy and THEN dnd hahahaha im gonna die tomorrow.

there were many things that michelle was prepared for when the avengers got back from the final fight with thanos. maybe there wouldn’t be an ending, maybe the avengers would all die at the big purple fuck’s hand and they would all be doomed to this existence forever. maybe, just maybe, shuri wouldn’t come back, would die in her first real, honest to god battle. she didn’t have the advantages t'challa had, after all. She was young and small and hadn’t had any real training. she barely even had the same advantages as her brother, had barely been crowned queen and gone through the ceremony before running to new york. There was, michelle knew, a good chance she wouldn’t come back. She prepared herself for the heartbreak early.

just as she had prepared for the likelihood that none of those that had been dusted would return. not her father, not peter and may. not liz. she knew it was possible. she had prepared herself for the eventuality.

what she’d forgotten to prepare for was the idea that maybe, just maybe, they  _ would _ come back. that she would be standing beside ned on shaky limbs and watching shuri descend from the ship as gracefully as ever, looking barely worse for the wear except for the deep lines that marred her smooth skin far too soon. 

the collapse upon seeing her, upon feeling her strong arms wrap around her shoulders, came from this lack of preparation, this over-preparation in the wrong direction. michelle could barely believe this was real. she could barely believe that they were back.

her heart pounded in her chest, her lungs crawled up into her throat, her breathing became shallow and ceased to exist, and the whole time shuri was  _ there, _ her arms wrapped tight around michelle as if she’d never been gone, even as she fell to her knees on the tarmac. 

it hadn’t been like this when she got word her father was back. she’d been breathless, shaky, clinging to ned’s side because he was the only thing that felt real in that moment, but she’d been fine. when he suggested she stay until things evened out a little more in the city, she was fine. when she watched as happy made a weirdly tearful reunion with the starks, she was fine. 

she’d broken a little when she got a text from liz, just a small announcement that she was alive and okay. michelle had, in fact, locked herself in a closet and dissolved into tears that she didn’t even know she’d had left in her, hugging her phone to her chest as if that would make liz stay for real this time. she’d pressed kisses to her phone as if the older girl could feel them through the screen, could know that michelle was there and missing her and wishing she could hug her again. 

(if liz did the same thing, michelle would never know.)

(she sat in the closet for three hours, and yes, she saw the irony in that.)

but it wasn’t the same as seeing shuri in person, not after all those days and weeks of killing any of the hope that she had. not after well and truly convincing herself that shuri was gone forever. 

and yeah, peter’s presence sent her crumbling too, and she was in shock to see the rest of rocket and groot’s team, in shock that everyone had gone to fight the fucking god of the california raisins and come back  _ alive.  _ But her heart felt like it was breaking and coming back together all at once when she saw shuri.

and fuck, that had to mean something, didn’t it?

and michelle barely got a break because a few hours later - though it only felt like minutes with all the sobbing and breathlessness and ned and peter’s endless kissing like peter had been dead only a few days ago except  _ oh wait he had _ \- a quinjet was landing outside and falling off of it was her  _ dad _ and _m_ _ ay _ and _l_ _ iz _ and the _de_ _ cathlon _   _t_ _ eam _ and god if michelle wasn’t broken already, seeing flash’s face as he realized that peter wasn’t fucking kidding about the internship probably would have killed her. 

and then liz was hugging her, wrapping her arms around her waist and burying her nose in michelle’s curls and yeah, okay, michelle was crying again but this time she didn’t care, didn’t bother to be concerned with her image. she felt  _ whole _ again, felt complete for the first time in months. 

she was okay again, and god, it felt good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the california raisins commercial is here ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM2OK_JaJ9I)


	15. reconstruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> reconstruction (ˌrēkənˈstrəkSH(ə)n)  
> noun  
> a thing that has been rebuilt after being damaged or destroyed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PENULTIMATE CHAPTER BAYBEEEE hell yeah i promise promise promise that ch 16 is gonna be out before endgame, that is my goal, that is my plan, that has Been my plan and it will Happen. it's midterms rn so the fact that this chapter is coming up at all is literally just because my brain is still wired from all the caffeine i just drank to finish a 900 word paper an hour before its due date and this just... happened
> 
> enjoy the subtle lesbians
> 
> s/o to Molly as always for being my incredible beta :')

shuri wasn’t sure how she was still alive. she wasn’t sure how she wasn’t dead on some planet she’d never heard of floating through space until there was nothing left but bone, how she was still breathing, how her blood was still pumping, how she wasn’t  _ dead _ . 

there was an air of victory on the ship as it hurtled through the cosmos that seemed to exist in simultaneous disbelief. even as they collected the rest of the guardians of the galaxy, strange, and spiderman from titan, it all felt fake. 

they were waiting for nothing, for another shoe to drop that didn’t seem to exist. 

shuri couldn’t sleep. she was convinced that if she did, this would all go away when she woke up. okoye stood dutifully near her side, fielding questions as she always did while they were hurtling back to earth. 

(back to her people.)

(back to mj.)

some part of her felt like maybe, if she dared close her eyes, this would all be a dream. like she would wake up before the ending, be back in her bed in the compound, wrapped around mj and that nothing would be have changed. that people would still be dead.

(not dead, but inside the soul stone, left to lose their minds. left with no escape. stuck for eternity. trapped.)

even the thought of seeing t'challa and her mother again did not make her feel better. what was waiting for her on the other side? she didn’t think she wanted to know.

when the ship landed, she didn’t want to get off. she dug her fingers into the seat, curled her toes inside of her suit, and squeezed her eyes shut. worst case scenario, she thought, mj wouldn’t be there. dead, alive, gone home, or just uninterested. the thought almost suffocated her. but then she heard Peter let out a small, soft gasp at the sight of ned and mj and knew suddenly that everything would be fine.

mj’s face brought tears to her eyes that she shoved back into their ducts until they hugged. but hugging mj felt like coming home, so she couldn’t help to break down. and sure, when her friend liz arrived, shuri put on the mask of a cool, calm, and collected queen (princess now, again, oh thank god) and hid that she was breaking inside, but then mj looked at her over liz’s shoulder and there was just the slightest down turn in her lips and concerned wrinkle to her brow that had shuri falling, falling,  _ falling _ to her knees and gasping for breath and begging - pleading - to be okay, and then-

and then there were not one but two sets of arms around her, and mj was shushing her, smoothing her hair back with calm, featherlight hands as liz whispered “you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe” and even though she didn’t know the other girl, it was comforting and safe and warm and felt like  _home_  and by the time okoye arrived, she was breathing again.

and second verse, same as the first, the moment she saw her brother again, running off of the jet that he  _ definitely wasn’t supposed to have taken to new york he was supposed to be in wakanda helping rebuild what was he doing _ , she was collapsing, sobbing and sniffling and unable to breathe all over again. because here was her brother, and he was  _ okay _ and she had never thought she would see him again. 

(he was gone. she’d seen the videos. he’d been  _ gone _ .) 

and t'challa was maybe not a perfect and strong as he pretended to be, because he fell to his knees beside her and pulled her in and they sobbed together, in perfect harmony, brother and sister as one. there was a small, infinitesimal voice inside of her that railed against the tears, that begged her to pull herself together in the sight of her big brother, but she was so broken, so damaged that she couldn’t find it in her to listen. they stayed like that for a long time, curled up on the tarmac of the avengers’ compound, so very far away from home and so very close to each other, until their tears had dried and their lungs had stopped heaving and their mouths were dry and heads sore from losing so much water and air.

and maybe it would take time to recover, and heal, and be okay again. maybe it would take time to repair the wounds from the wars. maybe the cracks would never mend quite right, would always remain jagged and messy and just a little wrong. 

but maybe that would be okay, so long as she had her friends and her mother and t'challa and mj (and maybe even liz) to help pick up the pieces and slowly glue them back.


	16. revivify

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> revivify (rēˈvivəˌfī)  
> verb  
> to give new life or vigor to; to heal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy smokes we've made it yall
> 
> it took some effort to pump out, but here we are, three weeks before endgame, and I'm finally done with my infinity war fic.  
> please note, i started this way before shuri was a confirmed casualty of iw (which, btw, WTF MARVEL), and considering i had 15/16 chapters done at the time and love my black panther shuri, nothing has changed in that regard. 
> 
> sappy stuff in the end note... thanks for reading!!

liz’s feet formed first. she was floating in an unreal, disembodied state and then suddenly the ground was solid beneath her, supporting her weight in a way that it hadn’t for the past several weeks. (months? years?) 

she fell to her knees in the middle of the hallway outside her dorm, and sobbed.

next was recovering, was calling her mother and messaging her friends - _d_ _ id that really happen, was it all real, what was happening now? _ \- and then… what?

and then there was a stark hovercraft over the green outside her dorm and promises of home. of mj. of everything being alright again. promises she could just barely believe might be real.

it was strange, readjusting to life outside the stone. she was unnervingly aware of every breath that left her lungs, every urge for food and water that had been unnecessary for so long, every pulse of blood beneath the thin skin of her wrists and lips that had been absent for long enough that she’d nearly forgotten what it felt like.

when she wrapped her arms around mj, though, she was warm and real and  _ alive _ . when shuri -  _ princess of wakanda _ , and her idol, but that’s nothing to think of now - fell to the ground, when liz and mj gathered her in their arms, liz was struck by the heartbeat inside her chest, the pulse in her veins just barely there beneath her skin. and with a start she seemed to realize that she had it too,  _ really _ had it, that they were all real and  _ alive _ and  _ safe _ and  _ here _ .

and so were flash and abe and betty and sally, albiet "here" being their homes in new york instead of the avenger's compound upstate.

it was hard to remember that, later, though.

later, like when she woke up gasping in the middle of the night because her lungs, no longer used to the unconscious action of breathing, had stopped working for almost a minute. 

later, like when she tried to eat pizza and could only manage a few bites before feeling full and nauseous and having to curl up on the floor of one of the compound’s many bathrooms and pray the food stayed down. 

later, like when shuri found her curled up in the living room of peter’s quarters - because peter fucking parker was spiderman, and the knowledge made her heart ache every time she looked at him, unable to unsee her father’s gun pointed at his head - her hands locked over her mouth in order to keep the volume level down so as not to alert the others as her chest shook with silent sobs and she coughed ash out of heaving lungs.

trauma like being as good as dead for several months was enough to break a person - liz could still hear betty’s screams from touch-deprivation that never healed, could still hear the overwhelming silence that came with sitting alone in a room with abe, could still hear the buzzing whispers of flash as he muttered to himself endlessly in the corners of empty rooms. mj and ned, peter and shuri, they tried to help, but it wasn’t something she could easily break free from. 

she was scared to be alone for very long, in the fear that she would disappear again.

mr. stark was, oddly, the first one to sit with her, to explain that healing happens slowly. he pointed her to mr. barnes, who still had nightmares from his decades of mind control, to dr. banner and his strange relationship with the hulk, to himself and his anxiety that so mirrored peter’s. he gently ushered her towards the others who’d been in the stone, and hearing their own struggles with readjusting helped liz figure things out for herself. 

(she wasn’t the only one coughing up ash.)

and then there was mj. 

and shuri.

both girls were always there to help her, offering hugs and words of comfort in the middle of the night. it seemed they’d become close in the time they were gone, and they were quick to include liz. after months of slowly becoming used to waking up in the middle of the night for each other and ned, it was easy for them to add her and peter’s nightmares to the list. it wasn’t uncommon to find any one of the them curled around her on the floor of the living room, with drying tears on both parties’ cheeks.

(and the part of liz that panicked every time she remembered just  _ who _  shuri was? that part of her grew smaller and smaller with each passing moment.)

healing would come slowly. liz would take her next semester off on medical leave to recover from the trauma, would spend time at home, and in wakanda with shuri, and new york with ned and mj and peter and the rest. she would get an internship at stark industries when mr. stark recognized her talent in bioengineering - a real one, not whatever peter claimed to have in order to cover up his superheroing - and would join a couple of support groups for victims of the soul stone at mj’s insistence. 

the first time mj kissed her was a few weeks before she went back to school, after dancing around each other for months. the first time liz kissed shuri came not long after, when the princess came to mit to do a talk and they got dinner afterwards, and was just as long coming. the first time mj and shuri kissed was somewhere in the middle, and resulted in a breathless and slightly terrifying video conversation about just what they were to each other. 

("my girlfriends," sounded so pretty coming out of their mouths.)

healing would take time.

but liz had plenty of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the past year has been a lot for me - in the time since first posting fragmentary as a oneshot, i've graduated high school and started college, which took away a lot of the time that i had to work on this fic. this story is one of the few i've ever finished, and it took me just under a year, and that's only because i was committed to getting this done before endgame came out and ruined my AU lol
> 
> that being said, its one of the fics im the most proud of, and it means a lot to mean that people have enjoyed it like, literally at all. 
> 
> thank you if you've stuck with me for this long. i appreciate ever kudos and hit, and especially every comment. those keep me writing. and as always, a massive thank you to my beta, molly, without whom this fic would never have been written in the first place, let alone published and completed.
> 
> love hanna xx


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